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April 2013 Entry: Róth Tharith, handdrawn map

Hello! I joined here simply because of this challenge that I found out about from the bay12games site. I thought I´d give it a go, since it seemed fun.

I prefer drawing maps by hand, since I enjoy the manual, almost meditative feeling of just drawing on a free day, so I decided to keep on the manual way. It's probably not gonna be as fancy as some of the entries I have already seen people posting, since I am by no means a experienced painter, but I hope that it will be pretty to look at, at least.

I made a small island world, tried a few until I got one I liked, that had a decent spread of civs and a nice shape. (The more I draw this world the more I love the shape!) using the legend viewer mentioned in the main thread (Thanks alot for that, whoever linked to it, it's been an invaluable help!), I then printed it out in several parts, since my printer only handles A4 papers and my final paper was a bit larger and I wanted to make it as big as possible to get as much detail in there as I could.
I taped the parts together, and got the correct size on the third try! =D
Wasting printer ink, me? No, never.

I then tried some methods to get the map from the printout to the watercolor paper I use, and finally came up with the idea to just use a hard pencil and push so that it leaves a groove underneath, which I highlight with a flashlight from the side and fill in. After that I paint the seas with watercolor.

In hindsight, I should have made the whole paper a gray-brownish base, possibly stained it with dilluted coffe or tea to give it an aged parchment look, but since I already started with the seas when I thought of that, I had to make do with what I had.
I marked the mountainrange and the ice levels just so that I dont forget later.

Next is to mix up color batches for all the different terrain types, paint out the mountains (I dread that part, since I have not settled for a good mountain look yet), forests, rivers and lastly cities and other landmarks as well as names and such.

I'll try to keep the colorscheme a bit grayish, not too many clear colors that will eat up the picture. I'll fill in all the details with ink.

PS: I am sorry that I cant scan the map yet, it´d be a hassle to do that only for a WIP pic, since I have to puzzle it together, so I am afraid you´ll have to make do with photos until I am done. I saw nothing against using photos in the rules though. Again, Sorry.

I have an Imgur album with progress pics as well. Check it out if you are intrested. Róth Tharith - Imgur

Original map

### LATEST WIP ###

Last edited by Khamero; 04-07-2013 at 06:30 PM.
Reason: I typo´d. Alot.